the personal (and mostly parenthetical) asides of Jake Nassif.

Omens/Observations

There’s a lull in my business every December during which I subsist on snack-sized projects. “Seasonal slowdown” I guess it’s called. And things pick up again in January.

Nothing to worry about. I should be grateful.
Nothing to worry about. I should be grateful.
Nothing to worry about. I should be grateful.

Right?

After parking downtown today, I got notice that each of my appointments was canceled, one right after the other. Having earned no billable hours and one parking ticket, I actually LOST money. Christ.

I’m tutoring tonight at a cafe in Seward, as I do most weeks. At my last session, we studied next to an informal gathering of Communists (or maybe Socialists; who can tell anymore?). Four middle-aged white guys with little red books and a comic-book-convention air about them. I would call one of their mustaches Stalinesque, but in any other context it would be standard-issue North Woods.

The guy holding court (studded boots, tattooed hands, receding hairline) was denouncing the lack of revolutionary fervor among certain movement leaders (“They wear Birkenstocks!”). He lamented that no one had the nerve to stick it to the “pigs” like the old days. Someone was labeled “Trotskyite” with palpable loathing.

I love people who stand for something, however marginal. But this was just pathetic. I couldn’t believe grownups were waging these irrelevant internecine battles in their heads, let alone out loud. Acting as if the intellectual vanguard of the movement was right here on Franklin Avenue, between the Somali study group and the kid tagging his Mp3s.

Will the real revolutionaries please stand up—and bus their own tables?